Non-spherical microphone arrays for spherical harmonic analysis of 3D spatial sound fields

Array of microphone structures are capable of processing acoustic signals to extract useful spatial information of three-dimensional surroundings, and are important in a plethora of applications such as beamforming, direction of arrival estimation, and spatial sound field recording. This talk first shows why the spherical harmonic analysis is the ideal tool to use in these applications. Then we review the theory of spherical microphone arrays. The spherical array of microphones is suited in decomposing a 3D acoustic field into spherical harmonic components; however there are certain practical limitations. Finally, we show how to overcome these limitations by designing a 3D array structure consisting of circular arrays of microphones.

Speaker Details

Thushara Abhayapala is an Associate professor at the Research School of Information Sciences & Engineering, the Australian National University (ANU). He received his BE and PhD degrees from ANU in 1994 and 1999 respectively. He was the Leader of the Wireless Signal Processing (WSP) Program at National ICT Australia (NICTA) from November 2005 to July 2007. He has supervised 19 PhD students and coauthored approximately 130 peer-reviewed publications. Currently, he is an Associate Editor for EURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking. His current research interest are in physically inspired signal processing problems in the areas of Acoustic and Audio, Wireless and Mobile Communications, and Bio-medical applications.

Aastha Gupta is a PhD student at the Research School of Information Sciences & Engineering, the Australian National University (ANU). She received her BE from ANU in 2006. Her current research interests are in audio signal processing, beamforming, wave field modeling, and array signal processing.

Date:
Speakers:
Thushara Abhayapala and Aastha Gupta
Affiliation:
Australian National University, Canberra, Australia